Wasta

Two Sundays ago, ninety minutes after Mohamed Morsi was named the winner of the first free Presidential election in Egyptian history, Mohamed Morsi appeared in the headquarters of the Freedom and Justice Party in downtown Cairo. He wore old sneakers and a dirty blue shirt soaked with sweat. It was nearly a hundred degrees, and Morsi had walked all the way from El Madabegh, an hour away. He was empty-handed except for his government-issued I.D., which he displayed for everybody he met. One of these people was Tarek Farhat, the supervisor of the media center for the Party, which is the political organization of the Muslim Brotherhood.

“I voted for this man, and we share the same name,” Morsi told Farhat. “So please help me get in contact with him or somebody who can help me.” Morsi explained that recently his oldest daughter had applied to study nursing at a government hospital, but the administrators had demanded a bribe of more than a thousand dollars. He had four other children, and he earned about six dollars a day on the assembly line of a leather-goods factory. Apart from paying the bribe, his only other option was to cultivate wasta, or connections. In Egypt, wasta is critical to success, although it usually runs a lot deeper than the accident of a shared name. But Mohamed Morsi is a relatively distinctive name, and an hour is not a long walk for many men in Cairo.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t help you,” Farhat said, and he advised Morsi to wait a couple of days and then visit his neighborhood office. “Everybody is celebrating now,” he explained. The room was growing loud; groups of bearded young men greeted each other with shouts, and the chairman of a Brotherhood think tank arrived and embraced a colleague. Two Japanese journalists sat nearby, waiting for an interview. If Mohamed Morsi felt out of place, he didn’t show it, and he told his story to anybody who would listen.

“I got injured on January 28th, when I broke a rib,” he said, referring to one of the violent days of protest in 2011, before Hosni Mubarak resigned. After the injury, Morsi had applied to the Ministry of Social Solidarity for reparations. “But all they did was call me during Ramadan last year and give me a box with margarine, cooking oil, sugar, and rice.” He said that his visit to the Party office was spontaneous. “I came here to catch the moment,” he explained. “I’m just trying to get a business card from anybody.”

His factory had let everybody off early that afternoon. In Cairo, the past week had been tense; after the polls closed on June 17th, the initial results indicated a clear victory for Morsi, but the election commission delayed the official announcement. This came in the wake of events that were described by many as a soft coup by the ruling military council, which had dissolved the Brotherhood-dominated Parliament and issued a new provisional constitution. Morsi’s opponent, Ahmed Shafik, a former Air Force general, had been the last Prime Minister under Mubarak, and people believed that the election was being stolen in his favor. There were reports of troop deployments around the country; somebody started a rumor on Facebook that the state television building had been occupied by the Army. Two hours before the election announcement, Cairo’s streets were gridlocked with cars trying to leave downtown, and it was all but impossible to board a subway train. There were long lines at supermarkets, because people wanted to stock up before the city exploded. For a year and a half, the nation’s political dialogue had often seemed abstract and circular—endless arguments about the trajectory of the revolution, the shape of the new constitution, the role of Islam in politics. But now people returned to basics: food, water, safety.

And then the announcement came. “I meet you at the end of a critical phase of building our nascent democracy,” intoned the chairman of the election commission, and after a long introduction he declared Morsi the winner, with fifty-two per cent of the popular vote. The crowds flooded back into downtown Cairo. In Tahrir you could hear them shouting: “The age of ignorance is over!” At the Freedom and Justice headquarters, a spokeswoman fielded interviews. “The revolution is continuing!” she said. “The important lesson is that there should be coöperation between the legislative and executive branches.”

Outside her office, Mohamed Morsi was still searching for a business card. “Nobody has given me anything yet,” he said. He talked about a recent incident at home, where some neighbors had tapped into the power supply to steal electricity for a wedding party, shorting out the building. He said, “I called the police, and they asked who I am. I said, ‘I’m Mohamed Morsi,’ and the police laughed.” He shook his head. The politicians may have returned to a higher plane, but Morsi was still down with the basics: food, water, electricity, wasta. “I want to get my daughter into nursing school,” he said. “I just want any wasta. I want to meet anybody who can help me.” ♦

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